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Old Friend Truman: Hannegan impressed President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other party leaders and was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee in January 1944. In this post he was instrumental in securing the 1944 Democratic vice-presidential nomination for his old friend Truman friend Truman. When Truman became president after Roosevelt's death, he appointed Hannegan postmaster general. Hannegan was probably the new president's closest political adviser. In November 1947 he resigned both posts because of ill health. He died in St. Louis on Oct. 6, 1949.
In 1946, Republicans won both House and Senate for the first time in 16 years. Two years later Dewey became the first defeated GOP candidate to win a second presidential nomination and had as his running mate, this time, Gov. Earl Warren of California. Dewey, campaigning against President Harry S. Truman on a theme extolling unity and harmony and heralded by all public opinion polls as a sure winner, lost the election in a stunning upset. Winning 45.3 percent [if the popular vote, Dewey carried 16 states for a total of 189 electoral votes against Truman's W3. The Democrats not only held the presidency »t also regained control of Congress by 263 to !71 in the House, and in the Senate by a margin if 54 to 42.
The picture was painted on the same day that he received news of the death of his old friend Truman friend Julio Gonzalez, a fellow sculptor who used to join him in many of his experiments in Boisgeloup. There are two ways in which suffering appears to be taken for granted in this painting: his grief over his friend's death and his despair of the times unite in a cheerless memento mori that could not have been formulated more desperately by any of the Christians of the Middle Ages. |
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